Category: Main Course

Cheeseboard tart

Veronica 2 Comments


After inviting friends for dinner we often find ourselves with a large amount of surplus cheese. On this occasion I was home alone with not much in stock for dinner other than a couple of eggs and the deteriorating remains of a week-old cheeseboard. So it was a pleasure to stumble across Rosie Birkett’s recipe in the Guardian a couple of days ago for precisely this situation — I had all the ingredients on hand except for pickled onions. It was so good I’m recording my slightly adapted version here in case the online version disappears. Gorgeous bubbling, gooey cheese, with a crunch and a bit of acidity added by celery and cornichons. A salad would be good with it.

You can use any cheese you have, hard or soft. I had no soft cheeses, but I had a couple of stubs of Pyrenean tomme, some Morbier, and an unidentified but fairly mild blue cheese.
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Smoked haddock Monte Carlo

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I first encountered this delicious dish in a cookbook called The Recipes That Made A Million, by Franco Lagatolla, published in 1978. Lagatolla ran a few swanky Italian restaurants in the smartest parts of London in the 1960s. There is lots of name-dropping featuring the likes of Princess Margaret, Gregory Peck, and Frank Sinatra. The fact that I still have it after multiple house moves is testament to the fact that it has some really good traditional Italian recipes in it. The beef olives for one, and an amazingly good albeit labour-intensive lasagne featuring meatballs with pine nuts, sultanas, and lemon zest in them.

This recipe is clearly not traditional Italian, but it’s one of the most sauce-stained pages in the book. I hadn’t made it for many years, decades even, due to lack of proper smoked haddock in France. Of course when I did buy some, I wasn’t at home but in the UK, so I recreated the recipe based on my memory and a bit of googling. Hence this is a bit different from the original but just as good, and quite easy to make. Well, if you don’t count the poached eggs, which must be proper ones, not done in an egg poacher. Cheffy hint: poach them in advance, set aside in a bowl of warm water, and have a pan of boiling water ready to reheat them for 30 seconds when you are ready to serve.

I didn’t measure anything, so quantities are vague depending on how many people you are feeding. Start with the assumption of about 200 g of haddock per person and work from there. No photo either, sorry!

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La tarte à l’oignon de Caroline

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Onion tart

Another recipe courtesy of a cooking lesson from a neighbour. I have previously known this as Alsatian onion tart, a concoction of slowly cooked onions, cream, an egg, and grated cheese. Caroline’s version is vastly superior; she skips the egg, saying that adding egg means it’s “just a quiche”. And she caramelises the onions slightly and spices it with cayenne and paprika, which make all the difference. Easy to do, and really delicious served lukewarm with a glass of chilled rosé.
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Tatin d’aubergines de Sandrine

Veronica 4 Comments

Aubergine tatin

A neighbour who is renowned for her superb aubergine tart kindly submitted to pressure to reveal her secrets in an informal cookery lesson, held outdoors on a sunny day. We produced five magnificent tarts, which were shared along with glasses of chilled rosé. I will happily make these for guests, as a substantial starter or light main course.

Beyond the aubergines and tomato sauce, you can vary the other ingredients according to taste and whether you need it to be vegetarian. We used combinations of chopped black olives, chorizo, and anchovies. I think blobs of onion confit or pesto could be good as well. For the cheese, we used slices of a log of goat’s cheese. But you could substitute other soft cheeses: feta, mozzarella, sheep’s cheese …

White aubergines

Other ingredient notes: Sandrine recommends white aubergines; she thinks they are sweeter and more tender. She normally uses her own home-made passata for the tomato sauce, but you can use bought passata or pasta sauce instead. Likewise, for the pastry, either make shortcrust or buy it ready-made. Don’t use puff pastry though, it is too fatty for this recipe.
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Pride of the Punjab

Veronica 2 Comments

I got a Label Rouge free-range chicken on special offer, only 7 euros, and decided I fancied a change. Suddenly I remembered a recipe from an ancient Josceline Dimbleby book, one of those little ones they used to sell in Sainsbury’s in the 1980s, for, I think, 50p. A Traveller’s Tastes, it’s called, and it’s divided into sections of half a dozen recipes from different parts of the world. She has been pretty much forgotten now (try Googling her to see what I mean, the results are scanty). But most pages of this book are spattered with sauces and other ingredients — I used to use it a lot. See also … this blanquette still features on our menu regularly over thirty years after I bought the book. This is another of her recipes that deserves a wider audience.

This recipe is from the “India and Burma” section. Unusually for an Indian recipe, it features a whole chicken. It’s easy to do and the sauce is deliciously aromatic. I serve it with simply boiled Basmati rice; a green vegetable is a good idea too. Get started early because it needs to marinate for at least an hour.
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Pasta ai funghi

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Pasta and mushrooms
I already have a go-to pasta and mushrooms recipe, but Felicity Cloake’s “perfect” version looked intriguingly different, so I gave it a try. I can recommend it — more fiddly to make, but it has an interestingly complex flavour. I adapted it a bit — she recommends whizzing the dried mushrooms to a powder and using it as a thickener, but that seemed like a recipe for grit in your sauce. Instead I soaked them and then chopped very small, and used the water (minus grit!) in the sauce. Also I used a herby white vermouth rather than the white wine or sherry she recommends and I think this really helped the flavour. I used dried tagliatelle, but I think this is a sauce that would go really well with fresh.
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Espinacas con Garbanzos: spinach and chickpeas

Veronica 3 Comments

Spinach and chickpeas

This is a classic Seville tapa: every bar has a version of it. It might not sound exciting, but you will never regret trying it. It’s delicious and much healthier than the many deep-fried or meat-heavy tapas available. Suitable for vegans as well as vegetarians. We don’t often have it as a tapa at home — it makes a great light lunch or first course, with some flatbread. I use the recipe from my favourite Spanish cookbook, Anya von Bremzen’s The New Spanish Table, which I can’t recommend too highly.
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Quick thin-crust pizza

Veronica 2 Comments

Pizza
Steve decided to make pizza for dinner yesterday. He googled a recipe as he usually does, and amazingly turned out two excellent pizzas less than an hour later. Almost as quick as a takeaway. We’ll definitely make this our default pizza recipe. It’s based on one from theKitchn, which I’ve converted from cup measures. There’s basically almost no rising time, apart from the time you spend preparing toppings. He did a selection: ham, mushrooms, and artichokes; prawns; and pear and gorgonzola, a favourite of ours (no tomato on this one). Baked on a pizza stone, but you can use a solid preheated baking tray turned upside-down.

Note: if you’re not in a hurry, you can let the dough rise till doubled, divide it in two, then put in sealed containers and refrigerate overnight. Give it 10-15 minutes to come to room temperature before shaping.
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Duck breast with dried fruit sauce

Veronica 1 Comment

I had a recipe something like this years ago, off a packet of duck breast — now lost, but this is more or less a re-creation of it. Delicious and easy. I used PX sherry, but use whatever sweet wine you fancy — port or madeira would work too. Serve with something to mop up the sauce: mashed potato, rice, or just good bread. This amount serves two (we never eat a whole magret each).
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Pasta with sauce forestière

Veronica 2 Comments

Made up by Steve on the spur of the moment based on what was in the fridge and pantry. Definitely worth repeating; it was delicious. It’s the caramelised onions that raise it above the ordinary, so give yourself plenty of time to get them well coloured. It’s called forestière because of the combination of artichokes and mushrooms.
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